Click stamp to enlarge, maybe.
Commentary on this Donald Evans stamp by D. Jacob Rabinowitz:
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In colloquial Dutch, Nadorp means “After the Village.” It was also
the surname of a friend of Evans’s whom the artist crowned as prince of this
small Northern European country. Evans created a wide range of stamps for
Nadorp, featuring typically Dutch subjects ranging from ships to windmills to
the vegetables found in every country garden. He also created stamp series that
celebrated the principality’s luchtpost (airmail service) based on
photographs of early airplanes. Evans’s Nadorp 1924 Stunt Flying in souvenir
sheet (1976) celebrates the first kunstvlucht (literally art
flight, or stunt flight) in Nadorp. In the world of Evans’s stamps, the flight
took place at the vliegveld (airfield) of Adelshoeve in the summer of
1924.
To commemorate the occasion, Evans depicted a Blackburn Ripon biplane
performing a loop-the-loop across eight stamps of a perforated sheet. To create
the faintly visible cancellation mark in the center of the composition, Evans
carved a unique rubber stamp using an X-Acto Knife.
In a 1975 interview, Evans explained, “I’ll cancel over the stamp to
deliberately obscure things or just to be perverse, to establish a certain layer
of distance from the work.” He continued, “To my knowledge there are no artists
who make stamps the way I do. But there very well may be.”1
More than thirty years later, Evans’s
art remains astounding, not only in terms of the intricate world it imagines,
but also in terms of its distance from the 1970s New York art scene from which
it emerged. Evans’s postal oeuvre, his Catalogue of the World, manages
to be both comprehensive and singular.
1. Donald Evans, “A Portfolio of Stamps of the
World,” Paris Review 62 (1975)
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